Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday March 19, 2011 @11:50PM
from the must-be-quaking-in-redmond dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Chinese smartphone maker ZTE, fifth largest in the world, has publicly criticized Microsoft for the lackluster market reaction to its Windows Phone 7 operating system and said that ZTE has no plans to develop a WP7-powered phone. That's bad news for Microsoft for its well-regarded but not well-received mobile OS."

FTFA: "But I think Microsoft should understand that it doesn’t have an engineering or a product problem, it has a marketing problem and that it needs to address it"
I tend to ignore anyone who tries to explain a trend (or lack there of) in the mobile space but I agree with this point.
As a mobile developer I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and "fun" it could be to build a WP7 app. The development tools arent too bad and seem pretty mature. Also, aside from the Windows-Live nagging I have found the OS to be fairly well engineered, which is saying a lot in the current Mobile OS landscape.
All that said I dont know what else could be attributed to how ZTE, LG, and the market in general have responded to WP7 other than the poor marketing.

The updates you refer to in (1) and (2) are the same update. They had some issues getting out the door and getting the update train running. Hopefully that's all smoothed out now.

And the first "real" update is scheduled for next week. It includes copy/paste, faster app launching, and a few other features.

A major update is scheduled for next fall, that includes a lot of new features, from multi-tasking to IE9/HTML5 support, etc. So yes, they DO have a plan to 'catch up', and in fact have been pretty clear in communicating it (they've showed off the fall update recently, demonstrating many of its new features).

One thing you've got to remeber is, while you as a developer may love wp7 that means nothing at all to the people that buy phones.

This is an excellent point. Microsoft is accustomed to having huge market share and trying to woo developers to their platforms (and away from other platforms) by making reasonable developer tools (which don't produce cross-platform binaries). In this case how easy it is to develop for WP7 is almost totally irrelevant right now, because developers aren't going to want to spend resources writing non-portable applications for WP7 if nobody is buying the phones.

Having been involved on the fringes of a microsoft-backed WP7 project (sub-contractor to the sub-contractor to the sub-contractor kinda deal), I can say the OS, ok it's not iOS, but it's a lot better than what you'd expect from a Microsoft mobile effort. But the hardware-software interlink is awful, shoddy and downright crap, it has NOTHING on the iPhone experience, and where it really, really falls down is the fact that, MS-backed (financed) projects aside, not much is being made because it's almost as easy as iOS to write for, with no actual plus points; no community, no customers, no hype, no nothing.

Manufactuers are free to add dedicated keyboards, larger screens, faster processors, more memory, better screen tech, different colors, more buttons, better cameras, different materials, etc. The real limitation imposed on manufacturers is that they can't create a cheap phone which can't handle the OS, which they seem to love to do with Android phones.

And as far as UI customization, the manufacturers might not appreciate that, but I sure do. I'd prefer to keep the default UI. And manufacturers are free to add their own hub if they so choose.

Since you're being paid do endorse the product, maybe you could at least try to give your employers value for their money. This, for example, is an obvious shill comment, and will be disregarded on Slashdot:

After a couple of weeks using product A, it replaced product B as my primary device. It is a brand of shampoo above product B in every respect.

It's not even subtle. A better shill comment would be:

I really liked product B, but I found feature X to be a bit cumbersome to use and I really missed feature Y. Product A has some faults, but feature X is a lot easier to use, and it has feature Y.

An ever better shill comment would be expanding on one of these points, for example explaining that using feature X on product B required this sequence of actions, while on product A it only required a shorter sequence, and explaining why anyone should care about feature Y. Of course, at this point, you're getting dangerously close to giving an honest review, which may not be what your corporate overlords are looking for.